Beyond the Human and the Patriarchal: Ecofeminism and Animal Ethics in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Abstract
This paper examines the ways Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, synthesizes feminist and environmental thought to mount a coordinated critique of species hierarchies and patriarchal structures. Narrated through the singular perspective of Janina Duszejko—an elderly woman who advocates for animals and imagines their demand for justice—the novel compels a re-evaluation of moral responsibility beyond the human. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “companion species,” Cary Wolfe’s critique of speciesism, and ecofeminist insights from Vandana Shiva and Carolyn Merchant, this study argues that Tokarczuk constructs an ethical counter-narrative grounded in care, interdependence, and gender-aware epistemology. The novel’s persistent attention to hunting, animal suffering, and environmental degradation exposes how anthropocentric and androcentric worldviews mutually reinforce systems of domination. Janina’s position as an aging woman and social outsider becomes a site of epistemological resistance, where empathy and relationality contest detached, patriarchal rationality. Through an ecofeminist and multispecies critical lens, this article contends that Tokarczuk imagines a form of justice rooted in mutual respect rather than control. Ultimately, it situates Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead within the expanding fields of feminist ecocriticism and animal studies, demonstrating how narrative fiction can articulate the new ethical frameworks urgently needed in an age of ecological crisis.
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Introduction
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009, English translation 2018) masterfully blends crime fiction with profound philosophical inquiry. The narrative follows Janina Duszejko, a retired engineer and teacher living in a remote Polish village, whose profound respect for animals and unconventional beliefs—including astrology and the poetry of William Blake—place her in direct conflict with her community’s powerful men. When local hunters and authorities begin to die under mysterious circumstances, Janina posits that the animals are enacting retribution. Dismissed as a madwoman, her perspective challenges the reader to reconsider the foundations of justice, empathy, and community.
More than a conventional mystery, Tokarczuk’s novel employs irony, symbolism, and a transgressive narrative voice to critique systems of domination over nature, animals, and marginalized humans. This paper argues that Drive Your Plow offers a potent ecofeminist and posthumanist critique, dismantling the dualistic hierarchies that elevate (male) humans above women, animals, and the environment. Janina Duszejko embodies a form of resistance that echoes Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” across species and Vandana Shiva’s vision of making peace with the Earth.
Through an analysis framed by the work of theorists including Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Shiva, and Carolyn Merchant, this study will demonstrate how Tokarczuk’s novel 1) exposes the interconnected logic of patriarchy and anthropocentrism; 2) champions embodied, situated knowledge over detached rationality; and 3) uses literary form to explore the radical, even violent, implications of a truly multispecies ethics. The novel’s resonance extends beyond the page, as evidenced by its adoption as a symbol in real-world environmental protests in Poland. At a time of climate collapse and mass extinction, Tokarczuk’s work provokes a crucial ethical reckoning with our responsibilities to the more-than-human world.
Conclusion
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a formidable literary achievement that uses the tools of fiction to conduct a radical ethical thought experiment. Through Janina Duszejko, Tokarczuk dramatizes the inseparable links between the oppression of women and the exploitation of animals, both stemming from a patriarchal, anthropocentric worldview that privileges control, rationality, and hierarchy over care, interdependence, and kinship.
By applying an integrated ecofeminist and posthumanist lens, this analysis has shown how the novel’s narrative strategies—its unreliable narrator, its ironic inversion of the crime genre, its rich symbolism—are essential to its philosophical project. Janina is not a flawless heroine but a compelling embodiment of the crises and contradictions that arise when one takes the claims of the marginalized—both human and non-human—seriously. Her story is a tragic, furious, and darkly comic demand for a justice that transcends the human sphere.
In an era defined by ecological collapse, Tokarczuk’s novel is more than literature; it is a crucial intervention. It challenges us to “drive our plow” over the ossified bones of outdated paradigms, to break the ground for a new ethics. It asks us to imagine, with Janina, a community that includes all Creatures, and to recognize that our freedom is bound up with theirs. The novel’s enduring power lies in its ability to make that demand not as an abstract theory, but as a visceral, unsettling, and unforgettable story.
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